Choose your Leader

Today or yesterday (depending on where you live) was the 80th anniversary of the Battle of the Phillipine Sea.

When the US landed in Saipan, the Japanese responded with a massive carrier attack (supported by aircraft from land bases), the first major Japanese carrier operation in a year and a half. Numerically, at least, this was the largest Japanese carrier force ever committed to battle and was faced by the largest and most powerful fleet ever put together in the history of warfare up to that point, America’s Fast Carrier Task Force.

Due to the sharp decline of Japanese pilot quality and a massive technological and numerical advantage from the American side, the Japanese 1st Mobile Fleet was dealt a giant defeat, losing 3 carriers and irreverisble numbers of aircraft for essentially no results.

The battle saw the combat debut of Admiral Jisaburo Ozawa, arguablly one of the best Japanese carrier commanders, in command of a major Japanese carrier force. Previously Ozawa commanded various fleets and formations containing carriers, but never the Kido Butai (or its successor, the 1st Mobile Fleet) in combat.

@Witt

Thank you so much! I appreciate your input.

@ABWorsham4

Curious. Would’ve been a complicated air operation, given that escorting aircraft may have had to come from carriers. Then again, the Western Allies ruled the skies.

The success

For me, it would depend on if I was the pilot, or the air marshall…

Pilot - BF109. The later spits outperformed the later bf’s, but 1940, in a straight dogfight, the 109.

BUT…
If I was looking at it and commanding at the high level, the hurricane. Easy to fix, easy to produce, fast turn around for reload/refuel, easier to train on, fighting over your own territory with a full tank. Yep - the hurricane.

@ABWorsham4

Hi AB

Started Forsyth The Fox a few weeks ago. Only about an hour in. Triplea keeping me busy and hockey playoffs going now, so be a bit before i finish it :)

@strategic:

I may would have been a proponent of continuing the war to Moscow to obliterate Stalin after 1945, so communism would be nothing but a fad and dead.

If I remember correctly, the USSR had something like 300 divisions in Eastern Europe at the time of the Potsdam Conference – a rather large figure compared to what the Anglo-Americans had in Western Europe.  I doubt the Americans and the British could have beaten those kinds of numbers.  I also don’t imagine that a radical move like expending one of America’s rare and priceless A-bombs on Moscow would have done anything other than get those 300 veteran Soviet divisions (who had just helped whip the Wehrmacht) really, really angry at them.  The US and the UK being democracies, they would have also found it a trifle hard to convince their war-weary voters and servicemen to start a whole new war against the country which had just helped them defeat Nazi Germany, and which was getting ready to help them finish off militarist Japan.

At any rate, if you exclude Cuba and China and North Korea, Communism today is in fact pretty much a dying fad…espcially when you consider the amount of free-market capitalism with which China has been flirting for the past decade or so.

of course i forgot about Ray Spruance…the true hero of Midway and one of the best Admirals of the war